The Fall of the House of Wilde Read Free Page B

Dublin. There he met Jane’s mother, Sara Kingsbury, said to have been one of Dublin’s most eligible young women. Sara had blue blood, her family belonging to the rich in-bred Protestant establishment, and inhabiting the distinguished Lisle House on Molesworth Street. Thomas Kingsbury, Sara’s father, was vicar of Kildare and Commissioner of Bankruptcy. His father had been President of the Royal College of Physicians and a friend of writer Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin for over thirty years.
    Sara’s marriage to Charles Elgee was beset by financial difficulties. Charles proved more resolute in spending than accumulating money, and the Elgees had to move from one house to another, each address less salubrious than the one before. By 1814 Sara must have questioned her choice of husband, as a deed of that year granted Charles £130 from her resources to clear his debts, though only on condition that he agree to relinquish all future entitlement. These circumstances must have prompted Sara to think of leaving Charles, as a deed also set out their financial position, should they separate. At the time, they had two small children, Emily born in 1811 and John in 1812.
    They did not separate, nor did circumstances improve. They emerged from this difficult period to produce another child, Frances, only to see her die at three months. Once again house moves ensued. First to No. 3 Lesson Street in 1815, then two years later to No. 6, where they lived until 1823, when they become tenants of 34 Lesson Street. Whether the proceeds from the sale of the house at No. 6 were used to pay off Charles’s debts or to finance his travels, either way he left for India in 1822 and never returned. Charles died in Bangalore in 1824, leaving Sara to cope with the twelve-year-old Emily, the ten-year-old John and the infant Jane, the baby he had fathered in 1821, a year before he left Ireland.
    Jane never spoke of her father. In fact, she tried to erase him from her life by imagining herself born in 1826. Her real birthdate was 27 December 1821. Growing up fatherless in draughty tenanted rooms, mould-sodden from decades of damp Dublin weather and stripped of gilt, fostered in Jane dreams of glory. Certainly the tall, full-bosomed young woman, with dark eyes and brown-black hair, who poured her feelings into shapely sonnets, seemed to have come from more exotic origins than Lesson Street. To the ambitious Dublin girl, the historic world of Italy seemed a better option. Her ancestral origins, she claimed, could be traced back to the name Algiati, of which Elgee was but a corruption. And when asked if there might be some connection to Dante Alighieri, she obfuscated, suggesting it could not be ruled out. Jane held fast to the notion of autonomous creation – she was enough of a bluestocking to pull it off.
    But Jane had real literary connections closer to home. Prominent among them was the novelist Charles Maturin, who was married to her aunt, Henrietta, her mother’s sister. Everything about Maturin, his notoriety, his literary talent, his sartorial eccentricity – he wandered about town in dressing-gown and slippers – appealed to Jane. Maturin began life in 1782 in Dublin and later became a curate. In 1816 his play,
Bertram
, with Edmund Kean in the title role, ran for a remarkable twenty-two performances at Drury Lane and rewarded him with £1,000, at a time when his annual curate’s salary was between £80 and £90. Financial comfort was short-lived, as Maturin used his fortune to assist his unemployed father and to pay the debts of a distressed relative, quite possibly Jane’s mother. Far more troublesome than money for Maturin was a vilification of his morals from the influential Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge denounced the play as dull and loathsome, a ‘melancholy proof of the depravation of the public mind’, and only stopped short of